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Sex and the city of Beirut

Radical: Joumana Haddad launched The Body magazine because she believed the physical had become taboo in Arabic society.Picture: Reuters

JOUMANA Haddad, the Lebanese poet, author and critic, recently
had a tattoo of a tulip imprinted on the lowest section of her
back. She pulls down her waistband to indicate the area in
question. ''My kids and my partner, they are not shocked that I
have a tattoo, but by the fact that the guy tattooed my arse.'' She
roars with laughter.

Controversy is not something Haddad is afraid of. She is a
figure of some repute in Lebanon, through her own writing as well
as her roles as the cultural editor of An-Nahar, the main
newspaper in Beirut, and the head of IPAF, the Arabic equivalent of
the Booker prize. And now she has launched a magazine called The
Body. Its subject matter - serious articles on masturbation,
transsexuality and battered women, as well as riffs on ''my first
time'' - has caused not just eyebrows but hackles to rise.

Haddad's website has been hacked into on numerous occasions and
she receives regular hate mail. Hezbollah tried to close her stand
at the Beirut Book Fair, and the head of the Lebanese Council of
Women has called for the magazine, which is sold in sealed plastic
in Lebanon and by mail order in other parts of the Arab world, to
be banned.

It is this last denouncement that angers and upsets her most.
''Obviously, I acknowledge that some people are not going to like
it. But that intellectuals have attacked me - and a women's
association at that - I find that stupid and insulting. I launched
the magazine because I felt that the body is a long-neglected,
crucial part of the Arabic unconscious that needs to be
re-explored. I felt it was unfair that the Arabic language had
become castrated of an important part of its vocabulary - that the
physical has become taboo,'' she says.

''Some of the things written in Arabic a long time ago would
make the Marquis de Sade blush. Now even the word 'breast' in
Arabic would be shocking in certain circles. It is your right to
approve of that if you want to and, if you do, don't buy the
magazine. Ignore it. But, equally, it is my right to publish it,
just as it is my right to walk naked if I want to.''

She shakes her cascading hair in a gesture that conveys both
sensuality and determination. ''It is this crazy society. In Beirut
you will see a woman with a skirt so short you can see her pants,
walking beside a woman whose eyes are the only things you can see.
That is Beirut. So long as the woman in the short skirt respects
the other woman's right and the woman in the veil respects her,
it's good. But it is not like that. The woman in the miniskirt
feels claustrophobic and the other woman is appalled.

It is hard to be objective. Our country is a puzzle.''

Haddad, 39, is herself a bit of a puzzle. To watch she is
kittenish, flirtatious, her dark-rimmed hazel eyes beneath their
extraordinarily long lashes coy one minute, direct the next. She
moves her hands all the time - flashing turquoise stones, jangling
gold. Her words tumble over themselves - her musings on politics
and her candid personal disclosures competing for space.

She says she believes in ''the art of the schizophrenic''; that
this is how she survived the suicide of her beloved maternal
grandmother, life in a city at war, the personal criticisms
levelled at her. She is an incredibly busy woman, combining her
myriad commitments with her studies for a PhD in comparative
literature at the Sorbonne in Paris.

And she's incredibly accomplished. She speaks seven languages
and claims that each one brings out another personality. ''All
these people inside of me are different Joumanas,'' she says. (In
Armenian she feels close to her grandmother; in Arabic, the
language in which she writes, a poet; in English she is ''cooler,
more relaxed''.)

HADDAD repeatedly refers to herself as if she were
someone else, a habit that denotes a certain self-confidence. ''I
have an image of Joumana as a child, climbing in her father's
library, to reach the forbidden books: Kafka, the Marquis de
Sade.''

She lives in Beirut, by the sea, which is important to her not
as a place to swim, but as a horizon. ''It is a very important part
of my identity. It represents Joumana. All this unknown, outgoing,
the need to see the other side.''

Haddad was brought up a strict Catholic by protective parents.
''I couldn't even go to the movies without my brother, or to a
friend's house without my mother waiting there for me - even when I
was 17.'' Top of the class at her convent, she was encouraged by
her father to be highly competitive - ''I am never satisfied'' -
and went to university at 16, two years early.

''In Lebanon, if you are clever, you become one of two things, a
doctor or an engineer, so I went to medical school, even though I
wanted to write.''

She wasn't happy and after two years found a way to establish
her own independence. ''I got married. It wasn't a passionate act.
It was my only way out.'' She transmuted her medical training into
a degree in biology, then worked for a lingerie company to support
her husband, who was still a student.

''Freedom for me happened like this: my head was liberated
through books as a child, then expression through writing, and then
physically through marriage.''

The marriage lasted 10 years; in that time Haddad gave birth to
two children, learnt more languages (Italian, Spanish, German) and
found work as a translator for An-Nahar newspaper. In 2005
she became the head of the cultural section. The editor is
sympathetic to her other commitments.

''When I am travelling I edit the page in my hotel room in the
morning; my laptop is my office.'' Her drive to succeed is
exhausting, she admits. ''Because it is your nature, you cannot
turn it off. It becomes something that is eating you.'' She is
writing a book on Arab women, and the cliches that surround them,
and would like to expand The Body, which has sold well, into
other areas, namely ''a physical space: a small art gallery, a
library, a coffee shop. But I don't dream. I usually plan.''

Her sons, Mounir, 17, and Ounsi, 11, are looked after by
Haddad's mother, who lives nearby. ''I am an awful practical
mother. I am just there for love.'' Her father is also supportive.
''I always say if my father had imagined when I was a child that I
was going to write these things and do these things maybe he would
have killed himself. But now he is proud. You do change your
parents as well.''

Also part of Haddad's daily life is her ''life partner'', the
French Lebanese poet Akl Awit, whom she met at the newspaper in
1998. They married three years ago, for technical reasons, and see
each other every day, but sleep in separate houses. ''We like our
spaces.'' With Awit, Haddad has found another form of freedom.

''It has been a journey with my own body on many levels. As an
adolescent I used to love eating, but my mother used to forbid me,
so I ate in secret. I hated my body. It all stopped when I got
married. I found an inner equilibrium. But on the sexual level, I
was a virgin when I was married, and it wasn't very satisfactory
with my first husband. I was a late bloomer. But now, apart from
the wrinkles, which I am starting to think about, I feel so good
about myself. I mean, if I had to choose it would be the best time
for me. From 35 until now!''

Did Awit back her plans for The Body? ''I mentioned it to
him and he said I was crazy. He said: 'It isn't the time; it isn't
the place.' Hell, I said, we have to invent the time. Invent the
place."

''People often ask me why I still live in Beirut, why I have
lived here through the war and why I have never written about it. I
say, Why do you look for the knife? Look for the scars.

''The scars are this woman who is writing this stuff, doing
these things. The war has given me a great deal of power. To
survive in a city like Beirut, in this world, you have to keep on
fighting.''

1261982390866-theage.com.auhttp://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/books/sex-and-the-city-of-beirut/2010/01/01/1261982390866.htmltheage.com.auTelegraph2010-01-02Sex and the city of BeirutSabine DurrantEntertainmentBookshttp://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2010/01/01/300_haddad_0201.jpg

Radical: Joumana Haddad launched <em>The Body</em> magazine because she believed the physical had become taboo in Arabic society.